| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker. By James Gavin. (New York: Knopf, 2002. 430 pp. $26.95, ISBN 0-679-44287-1.)

Postmodern world or no, the romantic myth of the tortured artist continues to affect how audiences view their musicians. Nowhere is this more apparent than in James Gavin's trade press biography of Chet Baker, Deep in a Dream. In chronicling the life and death of Baker, the white trumpeter celebrated in the 1950s as the embodiment of "cool jazz" who quickly deteriorated into a pathetic junkie, Gavin both explores that deeply entrenched myth and, alas, succumbs to it.

The book opens like a scene from a film: a cast of mutually suspicious characters gathers at a cemetery to pay last respects to Baker, the man whose existence bound it together in a web of love and despair. Eventually we learn the facts of the musician's life, from his unhappy childhood in depression-era Oklahoma to his fatal fall from an Amsterdam hotel window in 1988. Gavin's portrait of Baker's course between those two events is not pretty. The trumpeter emerges as gutless, self-obsessed, a wife beater and liar. Still, as the author repeatedly reminds us, people continued to flock to him despite the abuse. One is left wondering why they did.

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